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August 2025
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From operator to entrepreneur: David Garcia applies outage management lessons
David Garcia
If ComEd’s Zion plant in northern Illinois hadn’t closed in 1998, David Garcia might still be there, where he got his start in nuclear power as an operator at age 24.
But in his ninth year working there, Zion closed, and Garcia moved on to a series of new roles—including at Wisconsin’s Point Beach plant, the corporate offices of Minnesota’s Xcel Energy, and on the supplier side at PaR Nuclear—into an on-the-job education that he augmented with degrees in business and divinity that he sought later in life.
Garcia started his own company—Waymaker Resource Group—in 2014. Recently, Waymaker has been supporting Holtec’s restart project at the Palisades plant with staffing and analysis. Palisades sits almost exactly due east of the fully decommissioned Zion site on the other side of Lake Michigan and is poised to operate again after what amounts to an extended outage of more than three years. Holtec also plans to build more reactors at the same site.
For Garcia, the takeaway is clear: “This industry is not going away. Nuclear power and the adjacent industries that support nuclear power—and clean energy, period—are going to be needed for decades upon decades.”
In July, Garcia talked with Nuclear News staff writer Susan Gallier about his career and what he has learned about running successful outages and other projects.
Chunbo (Sam) Zhang, Alice Ying, Mohamed A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 68 | Number 3 | October 2015 | Pages 612-617
Technical Paper | Proceedings of TOFE-2014 | doi.org/10.13182/FST14-935
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This work has developed FEM models of ceramic breeder pebble beds and applied them to two categories of blanket design (edge-on and layer configurations) to predict the thermomechanical behavior of a pebble bed under ITER pulsed operating condition. To explore the pebble bed/structural wall separation phenomenon, a thermomechanical contact is considered using contact elements meshed along pebble/structure interface. The pebble bed/wall dynamic contact/separation process has been simulated, and the gap distance distribution and variation have been analyzed and presented. Pebble bed/wall separation occurs during the plasma-off period and varies with both location and time. A maximal radial gap of 0.64mm is found for an edge-on configuration after the 1st ITER cycle within the range of studied parameters. For the layer configuration, a poloidal gap of 1.99mm, larger than the pebble diameter, is found. The generated gap can cause the even large rearrangement of pebbles and result in a disturbed packing during further cycling. Consequently, a design solution is suggested to mitigate this situation.
